The Romantic Ventriloquists [antikvár]

Professor Bostetter died in the spring of 1973, before he had completed preparadons for the new printing of this book. Though certain minor phrasing changes marked in his copy have been incorporated, the text remains substandally the same as it was when it first appeared in 1963. It is unlikely, however, that he planned any large or significant alterations, for his book has borne the test of time very well. As Hazard Adams remarked during his eulogy for Professor Bostetter {Wordsworth Circle, IV [Spring, 1973], 160), the thesis of The Romantic Ventriloquists, hardly even in a period when it was not "fashionable . becomes, as time passes, more and more reasonable." Further, says Adams, "it is sensible to think that Bostetter's book, with its empirical vigor, and refusal to suffer convenient delusion about the poets he spent a career explaining, will survive as a quiet classic of Romaqtic scholarship and the seed of other books." After polemical extremes in the first three or four decades of this century had depressed the reputations of Romantic writers in order to promote New Humanism and New Criticism, it was only natural that a vigorous critical optimism about Romanticism would arise to counter abuses and oversimplifications. The result was that a dispassionate study of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron which did not reach wholly positive conclusions had then to win its way by special merit. Professor Bostetter's determined-scholarly independence, which prevented him equally from regrinding old axes or acquiescing in the [ix]